There's a girl in the commercial, smiling and eating a taco. She's gorgeous. Maybe I'm wrong, but she's awfully light-skinned, and looks pretty polished, for the middle-of-nowhere Alaska. If she's a model, it would be pretty egregious since the whole story is about a hoax.

Elliott reached out to Taco Bell and received this response:

"Your reader is right that it would be egregious to have planted a model in the ad," Mr. Maerov writes in an e-mail. "There were NO models used and NO hired talent used in the ad."

"Everyone who appeared in the ad were real people in Bethel," Mr. Maerov says. "The Taco Bell crew member in the ad is a real Taco Bell employee from a store in Anchorage."

The Winnower points out that the Times reader has obviously never seen "the Palin family (pretty light skinned!), Northern Exposure or that Anne Heche advice show." Put less politely: he's kind of an ignorant douche?